This invention relates to a method and apparatus for matching the elements of a photographic order after the order has been processed and the items separated in order to accomplish such processing. More specifically, the invention relates to a method of monitoring and evaluating matching errors to maintain a steady flow of orders without unnecessary shutdowns due to perceived errors in the matching process.
In a typical commercial photographic operation for the processing of photographic film received from amateur photographers, the orders are accumulated at pickup points such as drugstores, supermarkets, or photographic equipment stores and then shipped to a central processing location where the undeveloped films are developed and prints made from the developed negatives. Typically, the undeveloped film is delivered to the processing lab in an envelope which contains information as to the identity of the customer. The film must be separated from the envelope during the developing process and after the film has been processed it is necessary to match the developed film along with prints made from the film with the envelope in order to return the finished order to the proper customer.
The orders are usually processed in batches and even though the film and the envelopes are separated during the processing operation they are maintained in their original batch sequence so that at the end of the process the serial nature of the processing is usually sufficient to maintain correlation between the film, the envelopes, and the prints. Since it is a major customer relations problem if any number of films are mismatched and returned to the wrong customer or the wrong prints are mistakenly returned to the customer, processing labs are very much concerned with keeping a constant watch on the orders to insure that the matching is correct. Prior to the use of automated machinery and machine-readable coding on the various parts of the order, the matching was done by visual inspection by workers in the processing plant. In order to increase the speed with which the orders were processed it was determined that it was not necessary to check every single order since the serial nature of the processing typically took care of the matching process and therefore only periodic checks of every five or ten orders were made to insure that the match was correct with the idea being that if every fifth or tenth order was correctly matched that the intervening unchecked orders would also have been correctly matched.
With the advent of machine-readable codes that can be placed on the envelope, film, and prints and automated machinery to read those codes and compare them to one another, it has become possible to check every order as it goes through the processing steps and to check the match of every order prior to its shipment back to the customer. Currently, if there is a problem in reading any of the codes this shows up as an error in the match and the entire assembly line is shut down until the error is corrected. Usually these non-reads, when they are checked manually, are found to be correct matches and it is not a question of the codes on the various items not matching but just a factor of a misread or nonread of one or more of the codes on the various items due to initial faulty printing of the code, damage during handling or a faulty reader. Shutting down and restarting the assembly line takes valuable time which detracts from the production output rate of the lab, severely affecting profitability of the lab and causing customer dissatisfaction due to late delivery of orders. It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for increasing the production rate of items passing through a photofinishing lab by conducting an error analysis of potential mismatches due to misreads or nonreads of identification codes present on the photographic film or customer envelope. It is a further object of this invention to provide a method for conducting the error analysis in such a manner as to give weight to a detected error based on previous history of detected errors according to a predetermined scheme.